I'm still a fan of putting giant solar arrays in orbit and beaming their generated power down to receiving stations.. Of course, a 'dual-use' capability for the Akira-style vaporizing of pesky dictators is merely a secondary bonus..
Not to mention, in theory, to jumpstart hydrogen, onsite gas reformers could piggyback on the natural gas infrastructure. In theory, you could install one of them (a 'slow fill' system) in your garage, and gas stations could install them by tapping into local gas lines.
If I had a garage, I would _love_ to have an LNG or H car, be able to fill it myself overnight.
This could get you to hydrogen in 5 years, and solve the chicken-and-egg problem to the point where the rest of the conversion (where H is generated from non-greenhouse processes like renewable, biofuel or nuclear power), which will take longer, can begin.
Guess what, public libraries are not cost-effective.
Public parks are not cost-effective.
Depends on who you ask. People who live in neighborhood with these things tend to benefit from improved real-estate values, and the state then benefits from the concomitant tax revenue.
In theory, wififying your neighborhood could lead to improved demand for rentals, improved property values, and pave the way for new home businesses (and taxes coming from them).
Think of how many new businesses (and how much in tax revenues) came from the interstate highway program. Wifi could be the information equivalent of that (trying not to Goreify here) without quite so much environmental and neighborhood disruption.
Perhaps, but why bother with this announcement then? I mean, without Apple, a low-power G5 is basically an embedded processor. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I still chalk this up to the 'too little, too late' department.
Seriously, you don't think they gave Steve this news at least 6-12 months ago?
A new product announcment does not a deep roadmap make.
I think Steve saw this among a number of other bits in a meeting with Big Blue, saw it was a very weak pipeline, didn't get what he wanted in terms of pricing and development cost sharing, and was still pissed off over the 3ghz fiasco. IBM also probably wasn't terribly forthcoming, thinking they had Apple as a captive customer, probably not noticing the writing on the wall that was obvious as soon as Darwin x86 was compiled, linked, and booted. So IBM's trying to save a little face, but the horse has already won the Kentucky Derby and they're just now closing the barn door?
They boned it. The interesting question is, do they really care? I doubt it.
Seriously, data 'structures' and OO in PHP are teh unfun. Perl may look like line noise but at least it's _meaningful_ line noise.. $@% are distinct sigils, though () and [] could be differentiated better.
Perhaps you're privileged in the job you have and aren't able to sympathize with the tens of millions of unemployed or under employed people. Perhaps your city still has a good mix of industrial, manufacturing and service jobs. Once those switch to primarily service jobs things start to go haywire.
If there's so much dignity and satisfaction in physical labor, why do so many parents who are 'stuck' in it for lack of education push their kids so hard to get the hell out of it? Your attitude is that of a hardship tourist, and if you were to spout off at someone who didn't have a choice in the matter, they'd be quite justified in punching you in the face.
Link to examples of people with education and professional jobs pushing their kids into hard labor. There's a reason why the Python coalmining sketch is funny, I assume you don't see the humor in it?
As a case example, I live in Ottawa, Canada which is the capital of the country. Our employment mix is what many want the western world to be: 33% government, 33% high tech and 33% low-end restaurant/service jobs. We also have an ungodly high unemployment rate, something like 10%.
You have it deeply wrong: there is no way having a third of your employment being with the government (read: unproductive) is a good thing. It's a stagnating thing, and are you surprised that those jobs are stagnating, with all the union work rules and policies?
BTW, your unemployment rate also stems from big government and the relative difficulty in firing people. If it's hard to fire people, companies are less likely to hire, or are much more choosy. Look at Old Europe for example. 10+% unemployment in France, and yet they have to leave exhibits closed at the Louvre for lack of personnel!!
As most people tend to live in the suburbs, there is also little redistribution of wealth. People go to work and then they go home. It's exceedingly hard to get anybody out to buy anything that isn't the new blockbuster DVD.
Maybe if the other stuff wasn't overpriced crap? Normal people may not know much about art, but they know what they _don't_ like. And what they don't like? Pretentious garbage by whiners, except, inexplicably, for Coldplay. And what's with this 'redistribution of wealth' nonsense? Were you born after 1989? Communism has been EOL'd for 15+ years, and was deprecated long before then.
On top of all that, the cost of living is high which drives out most of the creative people.
Maybe if GST, PST, use taxes, fuel taxes, income taxes and other costs weren't so high, the cost of living would come down? Equal distribution of wealth has been proven by the 20th century to mean equality of poverty.
Overall, it's a really depressing environment to work and live in.
Read P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays in Hell' and other works where he visits pre-1989 communist countries and describes just how depressing socialism can be.
I personally know hundreds of people (through my record store) that would gladly work in some kind of manufacturing for a basic wage, or on a farm, landscaping, whatever just to keep busy and productive. The general malaise that results from not having a job or having a crappy paper-pushing job where you never accomplish anything, affects the whole city.
Let 'em move to China then, those are growth industries there.
Seriously, given public education (the closest I'll come to supporting government power) and job training, maybe these folks are neither smart nor energetic enough to get training in something useful and rewarding? Or maybe they're just useless goth mopes?
The barrier to innovation or self-employment by the normal individual is very high and you end up with a society of hopeless, dreamless sheep who just live out their days like zombies.
Sounds like Europe to me, not America. In America, it's freakishly easy to start a partnership or even LLC. It can be done for less than $1000 and a few day's work. Getting outside investment after that is as hard as meeting with people and presenting a business plan (which is where good grammar and spelling come in, y'all!) that is convincing enough.
Of course, having a good idea and being able to deliver are pretty much mandatory, but the only folks who don't have good ideas or are unable to deliver are your hopeless, dreamless sheep. Again, sounds like much of Europe.
What's so wrong with full employment and preserving meaningful physical labour. It's a conscious choice of choosing less speed, automation and wealth, so that people can be occupied and feel fulfilled with the little jobs they do and do well. That's what utopia is like, not where all our work is done by machines and we relax on the sofa eating chips.
OK, who threw the X11 socket back to 1919?
Seriously, this reads right out of some Eugene V. Debs leaflet.. And quite honestly, the argument behind that statement has been so thoroughly debunked by both history and popular behavior that I leave it as an exercise for the reader why the socialist paradise of manual labor is a joke.
..that as employee productivity skyrocketed, they kept laying them off.
Not odd at all. You have the same amount of work being done by fewer people, hence each person is that much more 'productive', and 'productivity' goes up.
The knife edge management is dancing on, knowing or not, is the amount of load employees are willing to accept vs. the availability of opportunity elsewhere. The more attractive the job market, the less bullshit people are willing to take, including being overworked. Therefore the goal is to keep people scared enough to stay put even while the world around them gets better. That only works for a little while.
Of course the other side of that coin is what we saw in the great dotcompression, where all the chairs get yanked and everyone is left dancing in circles...
... It's about as ironic as a black fly in your chardonnay? That/. is populated with Luddites who decry technology "took yer job"?
Who lives by the tiny little shell script shall die by it, or move "up the value chain" and grow pointy hair. Or come up with a cool hack that changes the world and gets bought off by clueless suits who go on to wreck everything.
The global economy recognizes tariffs and protectionism as damage and routes around them.
You are missing the bigger picture in life. And that is that spelling and grammer only matter up to high school unless you are an English major or a Tech writer. Otherwise you get credit for best effort as long as it makes sense.
Ummm.. No.
There are still plenty of folks in corporate management who consider reading bad grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation akin to the sound of fingernails scraped across a chalkboard. They consider correct writing and speaking a sign of intelligence, and the lack of it a lack of it. Of course, non-native English users get a legitimate break, but anyone coming out of an accredited degree-granting institution should be able to write a letter free of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.
Those are the folks who decide whether you get hired, promoted, fired, etc.
And yes, I am frequently tempted to carry a permanent marker around with me to correct graffiti, ad copy, etc. Seeing poor spelling is bad, but poor punctuation kills me.
I mean, I know that apache2 support is only available in CVS, but other than that, how's it compare to php?
I just wrote a bunch of php with PEAR DB and compared to perl it felt.. unclean.. hashes and regexes are unpleasant compared to perl, and I couldn't subclass DB cleanly since it has no constructor..
Granted, I could get stuff done pretty quickly because php is perl-like, but there's enough stuff that seems arbitrarily different from perl to make the experience sorta yucky.
I know some people who run current-gen consoles thru scalers (or use their HD set's scaler) have issues with lag: microseconds between when a controller is actuated and when the effect is displayed onscreen.
Scaler folks have had issues with HD upconversion lag when it comes to, say, DVDs. However, many HT receivers will let you customize your audio delay to compensate since lag should be fairly consistent. There's really no compensation for gaming, unless you're psychic.
Presumably, the next gen of consoles (along with decent GPUs in general purpose computers) will not have this issue since their output resolutions bypass scalers. However, some of the upcoming 1080p sets (Samsung at least) will not take 1080p via their HDMI inputs, so they'll deinterlace 1080i internally, and beyond picture quality concerns this may impact when it comes to lag. Or, use their RGB ins and suffer from D->A->D conversion.
Hi, How is Myth's firewire support for DTV cable boxes shaping up? Preferably HDTV. Is there a DTV howto yet, with tips for receivers generally and particular models particularly?
I'd consider swapping my TiVo out (given its really crappy slow performance lately, lack of digital audio or video, and monthly fees) but it's easy to use and having to go thru config hell wouldn't be worth it for me if I didn't get anything nifty in terms of features..
... I guess they need a bit of cluestick when it comes to non-tech publishing...
And an excellent Ask, even if it is a bit late... In the DNA tradition perhaps... "I like deadlines. I particularly like the whizzing sound they make as they go flying past."
This happens in NYC all the time, people complain every year if their homes get assessed at even half the market rate, many of them are declared to be worth only a few percent of the market rate, and yet nobody sells.
I believe there's a statutory limit in NYC (IANAREL, but my landlord is) to how much a house's assessment can be raised over time, therefore a brand-new condo development can have a relatively accurate (read: high) assessed value, while a house from the mid-to-late 19th century (like the one I rent on Staten Island) can have taxes far lower than that.
The 'burbs don't have those restraints, which is why 'burb residents are raped with large spiked maces, $11k/yr for a quarter acre is not unusual. OTOH they get decent schools and the pick of teaching school grads to babysit their rotten, decadent little brats (who grow up to drop out of nice ivy-league schools and develop fashionable drug habits).
One of the big problems that is crunching SI and Queens particularly hard is related to this problem: old-growth neighborhoods with lower assessed values are screaming to have themselves zoned with enough inefficiency to scare off smash-and-build developers who would love to put in 3-4 unit condos with no yards or driveways. The city would love those condos since they could be assessed full market value and milked accordingly. Luckily on SI there's so much room and so much dead industrial property they could fit a NASCAR track and a Wal-Mart without touching a single residential area. Hell, we still have NYC's only trailer park.
At least in NYC, you can get your neighborhood (or a portion of it) declared a historical district, like as has recently happened in the nicer bits of Stapleton (uphill, large houses and mansions.. downhill, crack projects and cop shooters).
Slashdot Mirror
Because they spend so much time idling in traffic?
Introducing the new Secretary of Energy...
WHO RULES BARTERTOWN?!
Solar power? Not very effective (yet).
I'm still a fan of putting giant solar arrays in orbit and beaming their generated power down to receiving stations.. Of course, a 'dual-use' capability for the Akira-style vaporizing of pesky dictators is merely a secondary bonus..
Not to mention, in theory, to jumpstart hydrogen, onsite gas reformers could piggyback on the natural gas infrastructure. In theory, you could install one of them (a 'slow fill' system) in your garage, and gas stations could install them by tapping into local gas lines.
If I had a garage, I would _love_ to have an LNG or H car, be able to fill it myself overnight.
This could get you to hydrogen in 5 years, and solve the chicken-and-egg problem to the point where the rest of the conversion (where H is generated from non-greenhouse processes like renewable, biofuel or nuclear power), which will take longer, can begin.
Guess what, public libraries are not cost-effective.
Public parks are not cost-effective.
Depends on who you ask. People who live in neighborhood with these things tend to benefit from improved real-estate values, and the state then benefits from the concomitant tax revenue.
In theory, wififying your neighborhood could lead to improved demand for rentals, improved property values, and pave the way for new home businesses (and taxes coming from them).
Think of how many new businesses (and how much in tax revenues) came from the interstate highway program. Wifi could be the information equivalent of that (trying not to Goreify here) without quite so much environmental and neighborhood disruption.
Perhaps, but why bother with this announcement then? I mean, without Apple, a low-power G5 is basically an embedded processor. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I still chalk this up to the 'too little, too late' department.
I wish there was an OpenMOO2 that approached the creamy goodness of OpenTTD. Or at least a version that could blow out to 1600x1200..
I wouldn't even have to abandonwarez the media assets!
IBM had their chance.
Seriously, you don't think they gave Steve this news at least 6-12 months ago?
A new product announcment does not a deep roadmap make.
I think Steve saw this among a number of other bits in a meeting with Big Blue, saw it was a very weak pipeline, didn't get what he wanted in terms of pricing and development cost sharing, and was still pissed off over the 3ghz fiasco. IBM also probably wasn't terribly forthcoming, thinking they had Apple as a captive customer, probably not noticing the writing on the wall that was obvious as soon as Darwin x86 was compiled, linked, and booted. So IBM's trying to save a little face, but the horse has already won the Kentucky Derby and they're just now closing the barn door?
They boned it. The interesting question is, do they really care? I doubt it.
C'mon, you don't know what they put in that shit, It could be zebra cum for all you know!
Time to whip out the Crisco...
You should bash PHP. It's an awful language.
Thanks for validating my own budding prejudice!
Seriously, data 'structures' and OO in PHP are teh unfun. Perl may look like line noise but at least it's _meaningful_ line noise.. $@% are distinct sigils, though () and [] could be differentiated better.
Perhaps you're privileged in the job you have and aren't able to sympathize with the tens of millions of unemployed or under employed people. Perhaps your city still has a good mix of industrial, manufacturing and service jobs. Once those switch to primarily service jobs things start to go haywire.
If there's so much dignity and satisfaction in physical labor, why do so many parents who are 'stuck' in it for lack of education push their kids so hard to get the hell out of it? Your attitude is that of a hardship tourist, and if you were to spout off at someone who didn't have a choice in the matter, they'd be quite justified in punching you in the face.
Link to examples of people with education and professional jobs pushing their kids into hard labor. There's a reason why the Python coalmining sketch is funny, I assume you don't see the humor in it?
As a case example, I live in Ottawa, Canada which is the capital of the country. Our employment mix is what many want the western world to be: 33% government, 33% high tech and 33% low-end restaurant/service jobs. We also have an ungodly high unemployment rate, something like 10%.
You have it deeply wrong: there is no way having a third of your employment being with the government (read: unproductive) is a good thing. It's a stagnating thing, and are you surprised that those jobs are stagnating, with all the union work rules and policies?
BTW, your unemployment rate also stems from big government and the relative difficulty in firing people. If it's hard to fire people, companies are less likely to hire, or are much more choosy. Look at Old Europe for example. 10+% unemployment in France, and yet they have to leave exhibits closed at the Louvre for lack of personnel!!
As most people tend to live in the suburbs, there is also little redistribution of wealth. People go to work and then they go home. It's exceedingly hard to get anybody out to buy anything that isn't the new blockbuster DVD.
Maybe if the other stuff wasn't overpriced crap? Normal people may not know much about art, but they know what they _don't_ like. And what they don't like? Pretentious garbage by whiners, except, inexplicably, for Coldplay. And what's with this 'redistribution of wealth' nonsense? Were you born after 1989? Communism has been EOL'd for 15+ years, and was deprecated long before then.
On top of all that, the cost of living is high which drives out most of the creative people.
Maybe if GST, PST, use taxes, fuel taxes, income taxes and other costs weren't so high, the cost of living would come down? Equal distribution of wealth has been proven by the 20th century to mean equality of poverty.
Overall, it's a really depressing environment to work and live in.
Read P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays in Hell' and other works where he visits pre-1989 communist countries and describes just how depressing socialism can be.
I personally know hundreds of people (through my record store) that would gladly work in some kind of manufacturing for a basic wage, or on a farm, landscaping, whatever just to keep busy and productive. The general malaise that results from not having a job or having a crappy paper-pushing job where you never accomplish anything, affects the whole city.
Let 'em move to China then, those are growth industries there.
Seriously, given public education (the closest I'll come to supporting government power) and job training, maybe these folks are neither smart nor energetic enough to get training in something useful and rewarding? Or maybe they're just useless goth mopes?
The barrier to innovation or self-employment by the normal individual is very high and you end up with a society of hopeless, dreamless sheep who just live out their days like zombies.
Sounds like Europe to me, not America. In America, it's freakishly easy to start a partnership or even LLC. It can be done for less than $1000 and a few day's work. Getting outside investment after that is as hard as meeting with people and presenting a business plan (which is where good grammar and spelling come in, y'all!) that is convincing enough.
Of course, having a good idea and being able to deliver are pretty much mandatory, but the only folks who don't have good ideas or are unable to deliver are your hopeless, dreamless sheep. Again, sounds like much of Europe.
What's so wrong with full employment and preserving meaningful physical labour. It's a conscious choice of choosing less speed, automation and wealth, so that people can be occupied and feel fulfilled with the little jobs they do and do well. That's what utopia is like, not where all our work is done by machines and we relax on the sofa eating chips.
OK, who threw the X11 socket back to 1919?
Seriously, this reads right out of some Eugene V. Debs leaflet.. And quite honestly, the argument behind that statement has been so thoroughly debunked by both history and popular behavior that I leave it as an exercise for the reader why the socialist paradise of manual labor is a joke.
Don't look for an upgrade anytime soon, communism was EOL'd around 1989 or so..
Though there's a merry band of fools who keep trying to patch it, the poor thing is broken as designed...
So, that shows there are jobs out there for Silicon Valley expatriates -- if they're 32 year old women -- or 32 year old gays.
It's the NY Times dude, gays and women in NY or CA are the only people worth talking about for them...
..that as employee productivity skyrocketed, they kept laying them off.
Not odd at all. You have the same amount of work being done by fewer people, hence each person is that much more 'productive', and 'productivity' goes up.
The knife edge management is dancing on, knowing or not, is the amount of load employees are willing to accept vs. the availability of opportunity elsewhere. The more attractive the job market, the less bullshit people are willing to take, including being overworked. Therefore the goal is to keep people scared enough to stay put even while the world around them gets better. That only works for a little while.
Of course the other side of that coin is what we saw in the great dotcompression, where all the chairs get yanked and everyone is left dancing in circles...
Google is leading the charge by offering extremely generous stock compensation.
Is that pre- or post-IPO stock?
Jes' bein snarky...
... It's about as ironic as a black fly in your chardonnay? That /. is populated with Luddites who decry technology "took yer job"?
Who lives by the tiny little shell script shall die by it, or move "up the value chain" and grow pointy hair. Or come up with a cool hack that changes the world and gets bought off by clueless suits who go on to wreck everything.
The global economy recognizes tariffs and protectionism as damage and routes around them.
.... Isn't that redundant?
You are missing the bigger picture in life. And that is that spelling and grammer only matter up to high school unless you are an English major or a Tech writer. Otherwise you get credit for best effort as long as it makes sense.
Ummm.. No.
There are still plenty of folks in corporate management who consider reading bad grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation akin to the sound of fingernails scraped across a chalkboard. They consider correct writing and speaking a sign of intelligence, and the lack of it a lack of it. Of course, non-native English users get a legitimate break, but anyone coming out of an accredited degree-granting institution should be able to write a letter free of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.
Those are the folks who decide whether you get hired, promoted, fired, etc.
And yes, I am frequently tempted to carry a permanent marker around with me to correct graffiti, ad copy, etc. Seeing poor spelling is bad, but poor punctuation kills me.
ObBob:
http://www.sablesys.com/apostrophes.gif
http://angryflower.com/worlds.gif
http://angryflower.com/destro.gif
I mean, I know that apache2 support is only available in CVS, but other than that, how's it compare to php?
I just wrote a bunch of php with PEAR DB and compared to perl it felt.. unclean.. hashes and regexes are unpleasant compared to perl, and I couldn't subclass DB cleanly since it has no constructor..
Granted, I could get stuff done pretty quickly because php is perl-like, but there's enough stuff that seems arbitrarily different from perl to make the experience sorta yucky.
I know some people who run current-gen consoles thru scalers (or use their HD set's scaler) have issues with lag: microseconds between when a controller is actuated and when the effect is displayed onscreen.
Scaler folks have had issues with HD upconversion lag when it comes to, say, DVDs. However, many HT receivers will let you customize your audio delay to compensate since lag should be fairly consistent. There's really no compensation for gaming, unless you're psychic.
Presumably, the next gen of consoles (along with decent GPUs in general purpose computers) will not have this issue since their output resolutions bypass scalers. However, some of the upcoming 1080p sets (Samsung at least) will not take 1080p via their HDMI inputs, so they'll deinterlace 1080i internally, and beyond picture quality concerns this may impact when it comes to lag. Or, use their RGB ins and suffer from D->A->D conversion.
Hi,
How is Myth's firewire support for DTV cable boxes shaping up? Preferably HDTV. Is there a DTV howto yet, with tips for receivers generally and particular models particularly?
I'd consider swapping my TiVo out (given its really crappy slow performance lately, lack of digital audio or video, and monthly fees) but it's easy to use and having to go thru config hell wouldn't be worth it for me if I didn't get anything nifty in terms of features..
... I guess they need a bit of cluestick when it comes to non-tech publishing...
And an excellent Ask, even if it is a bit late... In the DNA tradition perhaps... "I like deadlines. I particularly like the whizzing sound they make as they go flying past."
This happens in NYC all the time, people complain every year if their homes get assessed at even half the market rate, many of them are declared to be worth only a few percent of the market rate, and yet nobody sells.
I believe there's a statutory limit in NYC (IANAREL, but my landlord is) to how much a house's assessment can be raised over time, therefore a brand-new condo development can have a relatively accurate (read: high) assessed value, while a house from the mid-to-late 19th century (like the one I rent on Staten Island) can have taxes far lower than that.
The 'burbs don't have those restraints, which is why 'burb residents are raped with large spiked maces, $11k/yr for a quarter acre is not unusual. OTOH they get decent schools and the pick of teaching school grads to babysit their rotten, decadent little brats (who grow up to drop out of nice ivy-league schools and develop fashionable drug habits).
One of the big problems that is crunching SI and Queens particularly hard is related to this problem: old-growth neighborhoods with lower assessed values are screaming to have themselves zoned with enough inefficiency to scare off smash-and-build developers who would love to put in 3-4 unit condos with no yards or driveways. The city would love those condos since they could be assessed full market value and milked accordingly. Luckily on SI there's so much room and so much dead industrial property they could fit a NASCAR track and a Wal-Mart without touching a single residential area. Hell, we still have NYC's only trailer park.
At least in NYC, you can get your neighborhood (or a portion of it) declared a historical district, like as has recently happened in the nicer bits of Stapleton (uphill, large houses and mansions.. downhill, crack projects and cop shooters).
It is very similar to the GeForce 6800 series, with the exception of an additional "quad" (group of four) pixel-shader pipelines.
Yeah, but does it give you more bass?